Military

Heroe€™s Portraits: Lyudmila Pavlichenko

by

Lyudmila Pavlichenko was a female Soviet sniper during World War II.   She is credited with 309 confirmed kills and was awarded the Soviet Union’s highest medal for bravery, the Hero of the Soviet Union in 1943.   After being wounded by a mortar in 1942 she was pulled from combat because of her growing fame and was commissioned.   She spent the rest of the war as an instructor at a sniper school.   After the war she completed a degree and spent the rest of her life working as a historian, mostly with the Russian Navy.   Hero of the Soviet Union Citations are very difficult to find, … More after the Jump…

Book Review: The Storm of Steel by Ernst Junger

by

Just about everyone has heard of Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, it is the work of fiction about World War I. It has been made into a movie several times and is supposed to represent the inhumanity of the war and the hopelessness felt by its participants in the trenches. Ernst Jünger’s, The Storm of Steel by contrast, is a different sort of World War I book entirely. Where Remarque wrote an anti-war novel based on his experiences in the war, Jünger not only did not write an anti-war account of the war he positively relished his time in the trenches. Jünger was wounded six times during … More after the Jump…

The Actual Writing of a Thesis-Part 9

by

Well, I figured it is time for another update.   I have made the first round of changes to my rough draft and turned them back in and my thesis made it past my professor and is now in the hands of the second reader.   It went up to the second reader Tuesday and I should get it back sometime next week for corrections, if any.   If there are no corrections needed it will go the department Chair and then I will get a final grade for the thesis and the thesis class.   At that point I will be done with my thesis and should only need … More after the Jump…

Samual Huntington’s “The Clash of Civilizations”

by

Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations?, Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993, pp. 22-49 This article set off a debate in academia that continues to this day. What Huntington argues in the paper is that after the fall of communism in 1989, the world is no longer looking at a standoff between ideologies but that the world will revert to clashes between civilizations. The basic thesis is that the ideological struggle between liberal democracy and communism covered over or subsumed the natural differences between civilizations. He argues that prior to the end of the Cold War the conflicts that shaped history were primarily Western and have gone through three phases since … More after the Jump…

What is an Act of War?

by

In light of the beginning of Attacks against Libya and the UN Security Council Resolution authorizing the establishment of a No-Fly Zone over part of Libya I thought it would be useful to have a post about Acts of War and historically what has been considered a legitimate reason to go to war. I will focus this post on the Westphalian System established in 1648 by the Peace of Westphalia ending the Thirty-Years War that also inaugurated the current system of Sovereign nation-states operative in the world today. The Westphalian System did not spring fully formed in 1648, mainly because it was focused on monarchical and dynastic states and not … More after the Jump…

Heroe€™s Portraits: Staff Sergeant Stanley Bender, US Army

by

Staff Sergeant Stanley Bender, US Army SSG Bender was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for actions in France during World War II.   He climbed on top of a knocked out tank to locate the source of machine-gun fire that had stopped his company’s advance.   Then he led his squad through a ditch to attack the position and started an assault on the German position in which he killed 37 and captured a further 26 German soldiers.   He survived the war and passed away in 1994.   He is buried in Oak Park, WV. His citation is here: For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at risk of life … More after the Jump…

Book Review (sort of): Julius Caesar -The Gallic Wars

by

Caesar’s Gallic Wars are a series of eight books that Caesar either wrote or had written detailing his actions during the eight years he was the Roman governor in Gaul.   They are best understood as an exercise in propaganda because during the time he was away from Rome the books were an excellent way to keep his name in front of the people in Rome and to enhance his reputation and prestige.   That being said, they are still invaluable as an account of his time there and as a look into the mind of one of the best politicians of the most powerful polity of his age.  It … More after the Jump…

Heroe’s Portraits: Captain Charles Upham.

by

Captain Charles Upham is one of the three men who were awarded the Victoria Cross twice.   Both his awards were won during World War II, the first in the Battle for Crete in 1941 and the second at the Battle of El Alamein in 1942.   He was captured in the action that earned him the second VC and spent the remainder of the war as POW in Colditz prison.   He retired to New Zealand after the war and bought a farm.   He died in 1994 at the age of 86 in a Christchurch, New Zealand.   His VC and Bar are on display at the Queen … More after the Jump…

Heroe’s Portraits: Surgeon Captain Arthur Martin-Leake

by

Double VC holder: Surgeon Captain Arthur Martin-Leake

Surgeon Captain Arthur Martin-Leake is a two-time winner of the Victoria Cross.   He is one of only three men who have won the VC twice, and two of the double winners were medical men.   He won his first VC in 1902 during the Boer War in South Africa when he treated 8 wounded men in full view of the enemy and remained at his position providing them treatment despite being shot three times himself.   He recieved his second award in World War I during First Ypres for continually exposing himself to enemy fire to retrieve wounded men forward of the British trenches.   He survived the First World War and died in 1953.   He is buried at High Cross in Hertfordshire, England.

More after the Jump…

Battle of Carrhae, 53 B.C.

by

The Battle of Carrhae in 53 B.C. was one of the biggest military disasters Rome ever suffered, ranking right up there with Cannae, The Teutoberg Forest, and Lake Trasimene.   The battle occurred in what is today Syria between a Roman army under Marcus Licinius Crassus and a Parthian (Persian) army under a general Surena.   In the battle, seven legions were destroyed and their Eagles taken and Rome did not trouble the Parthian Empire again for almost 50 years.

The battle was written about by both Livy and Plutarch.   The links are to translations of their texts.

More after the Jump…

Are there similarities between the War in Vietnam and the War in Afghanistan? – Part 2

by

The last question that needs to be answered as concerns the parallels between Afghanistan and Vietnam is why we are not pursuing a campaign of territorial conquest.   In Vietnam, the U.S. did not seek to gain and maintain control of territory; rather they sought to combat only the military forces of the insurgents.   That is why the now legendary “body count” was so important in Vietnam.   The same thing is not happening in Afghanistan, at least to the extent that the “body count” is important.   The metric I see being used to determine progress in Afghanistan in place of the “body count” is tracking how many attacks occur within delineated sectors of territory.   This metric is probably just as useless in determining victory or progress, as was the body count.   So many factors go into determining how many attacks occur in a given region that the actual number of attacks is meaningless.

More after the Jump…

Heroe€™s Portraits: Sergeant William Wilson, US Army

by

I had to include Sergeant William Wilson because he is one of the nineteen people who have been twice awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor and because he belonged the regiment that I was assigned to for both of my deployments.   My unit Forward Operating Base was also named in his honor in Iraq in 2004-2005. There is actually not much known about him.   His citations are below but they do not provide much in the way of detail about the actions in which he earned the award or about him in general.   He is buried in the San Francisco National Cemetery.  WILSON, WILLIAM Rank and organization: … More after the Jump…

Book Review: Soldat: Reflections of German Soldier, 1936-1949 by Sigfried Knappe

by

Book Review: Soldat: Reflections of  German Soldier, 1936-1949 by Sigfried Knappe and Ted Brusaw

I realized this morning that it has been a while since I posted a book review and I just finished re-reading this book yesterday and thought I would post a review of it.

This is a ghost-written account of Major Knappe’s time in the Wehrmacht between 1936 and his release from Russian captivity in 1949.   I first read this book in the mid-90s when it was first released.   At the time, I was very much into reading about World War II and thought that reading a book from the German perspective would be enlightening.   I was not disappointed with this book.

More after the Jump…

The Thirteenth-Century Crusade Against Novgorod

by

            Beginning in the thirteenth century the Swedes attempted to continue their expansion to the east into the territory of the Lapp people and the Orthodox Russians of Novgorod.   They harnessed the rhetoric of Crusade as they expanded to the east to gain more control of the Lapp people and exploited the fur trade, hunting, and fishing of the indigenous people.

            It was not just economic concerns that animated the Swedes and Norwegians to expand to control the far-northern trade, religion played a role.   The Catholic Swedes sought to extend the Latin Church’s influence to the east and north while the Orthodox Russians sought to do the same with their brand of Christianity.   Prior to the thirteenth century this impulse had went hand in hand with normal expansion, religious affiliation went hand in hand with political control, indeed religion facilitated control of subject peoples.[1]  Religious uniformity helped mask the differences among the various ethnicities that occupied the far north.

More after the Jump…

+ More